Tales from the life of Lauren

Dinner at Ophelia’s

Sometimes you plan on staying up to watch the Rockies game but then you can’t keep your eyes open past 9:30.

Sometimes you plan on posting a glowing review of the new restaurant you went to but the experience turns out to be less than glowing.

What can you do but press on?

Joey and I’s 8 year dating anniversary was last night and I’m not sure what the rules are for anniversary celebrations after you get married. Do you stop celebrating the dating one and start celebrating the wedding one? Do you kinda celebrate one and really celebrate the other? Do you continue celebrating both because you’ll take any excuse to go out to dinner? Yeah, I think I’ll stick with that last one.

Ya know how I’m head over heels in love with Linger and Root Down? Well they just opened a sister restaurant called Ophelia’s in a building that used to be a brothel. I booked a res as soon as the restaurant opened a few months ago, figuring it’d be the perfect spot for an intimate anniversary dinner. First stop, cocktails! When in doubt, order the cocktail with ginger beer.

Second stop, cheese! We split two starters to… uh start. The first being Peppadew Poppers, stuffed with cream cheese and served with cheese curds, a blood orange marmalade and mustard dipping sauces. Uh yes please. It worked out perfectly because Joey was so into the peppers and I was so into the cheese curds. Also, we got a huge kick out of that tiny fry basket.

You know what this meal could use? More cheese! This is the Spring Cheese Incident and it gets my vote for puniest dish name and my vote for best thing we ate. Basically, it was a skillet of melty cheese with asparagus, tomatoes, zucchini and almonds on top plus pita for dipping. Though we totally just dug our forks in it too.

For the main event, we split the Wagyu Beef Sliders and the Bolognese, Mozzarella, Roasted Carrots & Basil Flatbread. We both thought the beef sliders were just okay. I actually compared them to White Castle sliders which might be good and might be bad depending on who you are 😛 But I did love the flatbread. Who knew roasted carrots went so well on a pizza?

For dessert, we each ordered a Smoked Salt Caramel. A dessert for those of us who are so full but find it incredibly difficult to pass up a post-dinner sweet treat. These were teeny so it was the perfect bite at the end of the meal without putting you over the fullness brink. Also, we were like “do we eat these petals?”

While the food was all phenomenal (and we actually liked it better than the food at both Root Down and Linger — what?!), there were a handful of service-related disappointments that really added up. Maybe they were new restaurant kinks, maybe I’m hard to please or maybe it was all just a fluke but I expected more from this place. I’m sure we’ll be back but maybe I’ll just set my standards a little lower next time.